Mike Huckabee, the U.S. ambassador to Israel, visited Yad Vashem on Thursday to pay tribute to the six million Jews murdered during the Holocaust.
During his visit, Huckabee laid a wreath in the Hall of Remembrance, bearing the inscription of the U.S. embassy in Jerusalem, and he signed a guest book.
“It never ceases to touch me deeply to be at this holy place of remembrance,” Huckabee wrote.
The envoy noted that when he brought his daughter Sarah Huckabee Sanders—now the Arkansas governor—to Yad Vashem when she was 11, “she wrote in the guest book words I will never forget: ‘Why didn’t somebody do something?'”
“Why indeed,” the envoy wrote. “Never again.”
Huckabee stated on social media that “the United States stands firmly with Israel in combating antisemitism and preserving the truth of history.”
Huckabee has previously told the story of taking his daughter to the memorial several times.
“In 1994, a young American father took his daughter to Israel. He wanted her to see the country. He wanted her to understand this unique bond between these two countries,” he has said.
“His two older sons were mature and teenagers ready to fully understand it,” Huckabee has said, “but his daughter was about 11-years-old, and he took her to Yad Vashem because he knew that there was no way she would fully understand exactly what’s so unique about this country if she didn’t realize what the Jewish people had been put through, and how close they were to annihilation, and how unnecessary that suffering was had someone intervened earlier and how only
because someone did intervene did it even.”
Huckabee has said he worried that Sarah could be “a little overwhelmed by the graphic nature of what she would,” and he resolved to lead her out if it became too much for the 11-year-old.
Sarah was shocked that anybody what perpetuate crimes against children. “When the little girl came to the depictions in the pictures and the artifacts from the Nazi death camps including Auschwitz and Birkenau, to which I’ve been three times—when the little girl saw those pictures, she fell silent. She stared. She read all the captions under the photos,” he has said.
And when the father and daughter were set to exit the memorial, Sarah took a pen from Huckabee’s pocket and wrote her name and address.
“She paused for a moment. The dad was looking over her shoulder to see what she might write, to see did she get it. Does she understand?” he has said. “With the dad looking over the little girl’s shoulder, all of 11-years-old, he watched as she wrote in childish scrawl these words. Words he’ll never forget. She simply wrote this, ‘Why didn’t somebody do something?'”
“That’s all she wrote. She put the pen back in her father’s pocket. The little girl didn’t say a word for almost four hours, but the father never ever had to ask why do people need to stand up and speak up when lies and persecution are happening, whether they’re happening to you or not,” Huckabee has said. “If they happen to someone else, it’s only a
matter of time before it happens to you.”